1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an image reading apparatus, an image processing system, image reading method and image processing method, such as those of a digital copier, a facsimile machine, a scanner or the like, handling image data as electronic information.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the related art, documents (documents in which images and characters/letters are written for which safekeeping should be provided or may be used in future) are in safekeeping in a book shelf or the like after being filed in a form of paper. Recently, as data processing comes to be able to be performed at high speed, and, also, data storage devices come to be reduced in price, a so-called electronic filing apparatus has been put into practice in which documents which should be in safekeeping are read through a scanning device, and are stored in a large-capacity storage device in a form of electronic data.